Some pearls of Wisdom?
- Not Really. Just interesting quotes.
Here are some of the quotes from philosophers that I find particularily interesting. If you have a quote from a philosopher (or a quote of your own) and want it posted on this site, e-mail me at nickhil@nickhil.com
"The condition of man...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone."
Thomas Hobbes [Leviathan]
"The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition, and mutual envy of the living."
Thomas Hobbes [Leviathan]
"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others"
Marcus Aurelius [Meditations]
"For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing." Marcus Aurelius
[Meditations]
"Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear." Marcus Aurelius
[Meditations]
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible." Francis Bacon
[New Atlantis]
"By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness." Jeremy Bentham
[Introduction to the Principal of Morals and Legislation.]
"By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness." Jeremy Bentham
[Introduction to the Principal of Morals and Legislation.]
"The beauty of the democratic systems of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis - aided by the force of nationalism and media control by substantial interests - presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon."
Noam Chomsky [After the Cataclysm]
"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet."
Saint Augustine [Confessions]
"An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor." Saint Augustine
[The City of God]
"There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it." Cicero
[De Divinatione, I, 118]
"But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search."
Rene Descartes [Discourse on Method]
"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues." Rene Descartes
[Discourse on Method]
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries." Rene Descartes
[Discourse on Method]
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
John Dewey [The Quest for Certainty]
"Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man." John Dewey
[The Public and Its Problems]
"Have no friends not equal to yourself." Confucius
[The Confucian Analects, bk 1:8, iii]
"What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the mean man seeks is in others." Confucius
[The Confucian Analects, bk 15:20]
"Society is indeed a contract...it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France]
"I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people." Edmund Burke
[Reflections on the Revolution in France]
"All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small also was infinite. And when they were all together, nothing was clear and distinct because of their smallness; for air and aether comprehended all things, both being infinite; for these are present in everything, and are greatest both as to number and as to greatness."
Anaxagoras [Fragments]
"Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."
Epicurus [Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers]
"Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."
Immanuel Kant [Critique of Practical Reason]
"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only." Immanuel Kant
[Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics]
"There is...only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" Immanuel Kant
[Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]
"There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contigent and their opposites are possible."
Gottfried Leibnitz [Monadology]
"Government has no other end but the preservation of property."
John Locke [Second Treatise on Civil Government]
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared."
Niccolo Machiavelli [The Prince]
"Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force." Niccolo Machiavelli
[The Prince]
"It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate." Niccolo Machiavelli
[The Prince]
"One can generally say this about men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain; and while you work for their good they are completely yours, offering you their blood, their property, their lives, and their sons when danger is far away; but when it comes nearer to you, they turn away." Niccolo Machiavelli
[The Prince]
"I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed."
Friedrich Nietzsche [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]
"Hubris is today our entire attitude towards nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines." Friedrich Nietzsche
[The Genealogy of Morals]
"Twice, when an honest, unequivocal, perfectly scientific way of thinking had been attained with tremendous fortitude and self-overcoming, the Germans managed to find devious paths to the old 'ideal' -- at bottom, formulas for a right to repudiate science, a right to lie. Leibniz and Kant - these two greatest brake shoes of intellectual integrity in Europe" Friedrich Nietzsche
"No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."
Plato [Apology]
"There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers." Plato [Republic]
"Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away.... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him." Plato
[Phaedo, 62]
"Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction." Plato
[Laws, 888]
"There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world."
Karl Popper [The Open Society and its Enemies]
"Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification." Karl Popper
[The Observer, August 1982]
"Man is a useless passion."
Jean-Paul Sartre [Being and Nothingness]
"Human-reality is free because it is not enough. It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be."
[Being and Nothingness]
"Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift...that's nausea." Jean-Paul Sartre
[Nausea]
"Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure." Arthur Schopenhauer
[Essays]
"The thing-in-itself, the will-to-live, exists whole and undivided in every being, even in the tiniest; it is present as completely as in all that ever were, are, and will be, taken together." Arthura Schopenhauer
[Parerga and Paralipomena]
"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
Adam Smith [The Wealth of Nations]
"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. " Adam Smith
[The Wealth of Nations]
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." Adam Smith
[The Wealth of Nations]
"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." Adam Smith
[The Wealth of Nations]
"To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?"
Socrates [Quoted in Plato's Apology]
"I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you." Socrates
[Apology (Plato)]
"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." Socrates
[From Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. II, sec. 31]
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Henry David Thoreau [Walden, or, Life in the Woods]
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
Voltaire [Letters]
"When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics." Voltaire
[Philosophical Dictionary]
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Ludwig Wittgenstein [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]
"Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries." Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]
"Hobbes had it half right. Mankind is all about power. It dominates everything. It's just that power expressed through the love of others trumps it all. There is nothing stronger." Nickhil Singh [Some book to be published some day]
"Like Socrates, I am cognizant of my ignorance." Nickhil Singh [Some book to be published some day]
Want to reach me? E-mail me at nickhil@nickhil.com
